Those joyous School Days of intimidation, threats, and Murder!  The helpful extras on this new Blu release explain how this tale of cold-blooded malice in a British ‘public school’ ( = a private school with a steep tuition) is deeply rooted in UK culture. This film version brilliantly directed by John Mackenzie reflects a restrained, ‘civilized’ oppression in the school tradition — morally righteous and proper on the outside, chillingly cold and corrupt at the core. David Hemmings’ newbie teacher is on the job only a day when his ‘unruly’ students inform him of their murderous conspiracy, and expect him to cave in to their demands. It’s quality filmmaking, with an especially fine cast, for a grim thinkpiece that’s disturbingly defeatist in tone.

Unman, Wittering and Zigo
Blu-ray
Arrow Video
1971 / Color / 1:85 widescreen / 102 min. / Street Date August 22, 2023 / Available from Arrow Video / 39.95
Starring: David Hemmings, Douglas Wilmer, Tony Haygarth, Carolyn Seymour, Hamilton Dyce, Barbara Lott, Donald Gee, David Jackson, Hubert Rees, David Auker, Michael Kitschen, Tom Owen, Michael Cashman, Michael Howe.
Cinematography: Geoffrey Unsworth
Art Director: William McCrow
Costume Design: Judy Moorcroft
Film Editor: Fergus McDonell
Original Music: Michael J. Lewis
Screenplay by Simon Raven from the play by Giles Cooper
Executive Producer: David Hemmings
Produced by Gareth Wigan
Directed by John Mackenzie

We’re always ready to see anything directed by John Mackenzie, whose The Long Good Friday is one of the top all-time gangster films. The Last of the Finest was just okay, and The Honorary Consul actually a little disappointing, but not every filmmaker can have a flawless career.

Set in an English boy’s school, 1971’s Unman, Wittering and Zigo originated as a 1958 radio play. Scripted by Simon Raven and marketed as a moody horror film, it’s an unnerving slice of sociopathology that connects with tensions about school traditions, while commenting on dysfunctional institutions in general. A new instructor is terrorized by his pupils in a quiet, cold way. School social dynamics prevent the teacher from acting — he at first can’t be sure he isn’t being made the butt of a student prank.

Beautifully performed and directed, U, W and Z was executive-produced by its star David Hemmings, who must have been hungry for meaningful roles in a British film industry that in 1970 was all but shutting down. The star of Antonioni’s Blow-Up would mainly find starring roles in horror pictures. This suspense item is a quality adaptation. It had already been presented more than once as a television play. Hemmings is excellent as a sensitive everyman overpowered by a new job that turns into a nightmare.

Described as ‘second rate,’ Chantry School for Boys is located on a rugged coastline. A teacher named Pelham dies in an accident. And filling his post provides John Ebony (David Hemmings) with an opportunity to pursue his personal dream of teaching. The first day begins as a let-down. Several of the teachers are dispirited plodders, including the art teacher Cary Farthingale (Tony Haygarth), who describes Chantry as a soul-crushing hell. Cary quips that it was merciful for poor Pelham to have escaped having to live and work in the stifling atmosphere.

Likewise, John’s wife Silvia (Carolyn Seymour) feels slightly abandoned. John doesn’t respond to her feelings of isolation, and he doesn’t share with her his worries about the new job. The school ‘welcome’ is mostly indifference. For no discernable reason, the most tenured instructor is openly hostile to John and won’t even talk to him. Is it because John doesn’t have the right background, that he didn’t attend a posh school like Chantry?

But much more alarming is the disturbing situation John finds in the classrom. The students in his Form (grade) are outwardly well behaved — ‘well spoken’ — but are also united in a conspiracy of insolent resistance. Their insinuating remarks and interruptions prevent John from conducting his lessons. When he tries to put his foot down, the student Cloistermouth (Nicholas Hoye) openly announces that his group has murdered John’s predecessor Pelham. The unity among the boys is maddeningly unbreakable — John doesn’t know how to react, especially when his headmaster (Douglas Wilmer of El Cid,  The Golden Voyage of Sinbad) dismisses and ignores his report of what has happened. Silvia is convinced that her husband is showing weakness. As we expect, the spineless Cary offers no useful help or suggestions.

The boys taunt John with evidence of their deed. They offer vague threats if he doesn’t accept the ‘arrangement’ they propose: they will do the schoolwork they want to do on their own schedule. John will give them all good grades, and do things like place bets on horses for them. In return, they will pretend to be model students when the headmaster visits, and help John to become permanent at Chantry. John feels powerless; his main reaction is to drink more, mostly with Cary. His stated plan is to identify and expose the group’s ringleader, but there’s no way to proceed against the boys’ wall of insolent defiance. When tensions rise, they show their position of power by luring Silvia to a squash court — and attempting to gang-rape her.

We identify with Unman, Wittering and Zigo’s unpleasant reminder of our own oppressive experiences growing up. We survivors of the American public school system encountered severely maladjusted kids and various kinds of psychos, but most were pathetic cases. John Ebony’s form is populated exclusively with Little Bastards intent on a criminal rebellion against institutional oppression real or imagined. We were familiar with the book and movie of Lord of the Flies, and just a few seasons before had been impressed by Anderson’s If…., with its semi-surreal look at rebellion in an English school. This story is less fanciful, and is thus more chillingly credible.

Nah, that could never happen . . . except that …

The main credibility stretch in U, W and Z is the idea that an entire classroom is uniformly committed to a conspiracy of intimidation, and murder, with only one potential dissenter. Poor John Ebony should be looking for such a weak link, not a ringleader. He should also give up prioritizing ‘keeping his job,’ bypass the in-denial headmaster and seek out a receptive local police detective. He should also be trying to find some way of secretly audio-taping his students — a tall order in 1958 when the radio play was first aired. The play confects to isolate the school from outside authority. John and Silvia have no car. This of course spares us a scene where the police are equally unimpressed by John’s concerns.

John’s weakness is his own ambition. He bailed from advertising, hoping to find career inspiration in the respected halls of education. Even before the student trouble, he’s too willing to ‘do what’s required’ to keep his job. This story does for the joy of teaching what Rosemary’s Baby did for the joy of pregnancy: John’s classroom is a nightmare. Some of the details make it feel like a purgatory. For bureaucratic convenience, a missing student remains part of the roll call (“Zigo is absent, Sir). The boys’ manners actually express a simmering contempt. They leap up in ‘respect’ every time they’re called on to speak. They insist on calling John ‘Sir,’ a ritualized bit of respect that means the exact opposite.

As a basic scheme U, W and Z has a lot in common with Anthony Shaffer and Robin Hardy’s The Wicker Man — no solution is offered for the school’s institutionalized oppression of faculty and students alike. John Ebony is not much of a hero. When Silvia doesn’t believe him, his reaction is to go drinking with Cary. After the attack in the squash court, Silvia is ready to stand with John and fight back, but rejects her offer with a defeatist shrug. The Headmaster has already told him his job isn’t working out, and John thinks only in terms of personal success/failure.

School spirit honors group solidarity, and teamwork!

Unman, Wittering and Zigo goes beyond older dramas about ‘unruly’ delinquents. The wife of Glenn Ford’s high school teacher in 1955’s Blackboard Jungle is also threatened with rape. But he isn’t deterred, and he uses inspired teaching and heroic force to subdue the lone ‘bad apple’ spoiling his classsroom. John Ebony knows he can’t intimidate the boys in his form, individually or as a group. They find different ways to threaten him, while maintaining that full alibis have been established for the day Pelham was killed. In the end, a ‘weak link’ does present himself, but the finale is no triumph for reason and authority. Nothing is resolved, and John Ebony’s nightmare continues.

The early 1970s saw many disturbing, defeatist pictures that left audiences unmoved, confused, or offended: T.R. Baskin, Little Murders, Desperate Characters, even Catch-22. Dark truths didn’t always make for pleasing entertainment. U, W and Z is well made and consistent, but it gives us nobody to root for and offers no emotional release. A horror film selling a premise of utter bleakness could find approval, but usually in a stylized setting, like Night of the Living Dead or Witchfinder General, both from 1968. U, W and Z is more like Frank and Eleanor Perry’s Last Summer (1969), which sees several privileged teenagers embracing ugly crimes, mostly out of boredom, and learing nothing from their experience.

John Ebony’s teenaged foes put up an unbreakable front. At first glance they seem as unified in malice as the half-alien monsters in Village of the Damned. The only humanizing element comes in performance details. When alone in their thoughts, individual students look to be seriously troubled and conflicted. Were they brutalized by expectations at home?  Are they numbed by Chantry School’s demand that they fit into their future leadership roles in society?  That’s apparently a ‘given’ for UK viewers; it’s the theme that made Giles Cooper’s original radio play so enduring.

David Hemmings delivers a masterful performance — John Ebony suffers under duress almost from the very first scene. Carolyn Seymour is entirely credible when she objects to felony emotional abandonment by her husband. Silvia’s encounter with her would-be rapists is the only time we see anyone showing bravery and resourcefulness. The ‘evil’ boys show real weakness, as well. Or are we viewers just being difficult, when we refuse to see the Ebonys’ dilemma as an airtight closed case?

Ms. Seymour impressed us later in Stephen Frears’ Gumshoe and Peter Medak’s The Ruling Class. Familiar face Douglas Wilmer is also fine as the polite but unhelpful headmaster. As the only faculty member to befriend John, Tony Haygarth (Holocaust  Brittania Hospital) is properly unreassuring. U, W & Z may not appeal to viewers that reject such a dark view of humans in general. ^*

Director John Mackenzie surely found cameraman Geoffrey Unsworth a great help — the excellent visuals show no budgetary restraint, and the scenes on the craggy cliffs are imaginitively blocked and framed. Some shots of the boys in their climbing gear give them the ‘biker’ look of Joseph Losey’s These Are the Damned.

The picture may not warm one’s heart, but fans that appreciate mounting chills will be impressed. The finale is more than disturbing — has the murderer of Pelham truly confessed, or is he a posthumous scapegoat?  Will John just slink away in quiet defeat?  He certainly doesn’t deserve Silvia.

Arrow Video’s Blu-ray of Unman, Wittering and Zigo looks terrific, much better than the murky, flat prints seen on old TV cable presentations. It didn’t make much of an impact when first released; although this reader remembers the ads, it stuck in the mind only through a review in Cinefantastique that opined that John Ebony’s main problem was suppressed homosexuality, and that he was insufficiently dominant in his marriage relationship. That conclusion seems completely off the mark — U, W & Z’s formative strategy is elsewhere. Lindsay Anderson’s surreal, sexualized fantasy If…. makes a much stronger case for homosexuality in the public school as an institution.

Arrow’s extras tap critics that know the subject — the input of Matthew Sweet, Kevin Lyons, Oliver Wake and Kim Newman effectively ‘school’ this reviewer on the finer points of the play, which as Lyons says, has lasting relevance because it addresses ‘various aspects of authority.’

New interviews give us three of the student actors and the leading lady, all of whom offer illuminating memories of the film and especially David Hemmings. One of the ex-actors rushes to assure us that he is now to be addressed as ‘Lord’ — he may be joking but he sounds sincere.

Matthew Sweet’s video lecture delves into Public School as an institution, while Kim Newman and Sean Hogan look for parallels in other dramatic films about English education, of which there are apparently not that many. As to the malice in the story, Newman recalls that in his own experience “I felt that schools did indeed know who the psychopaths were, and did nothing about it.” Newman deems this drama as more honest than If…., with its charismatic revolutionaries. He also deflates the incomprehensible good reputation of the movie Dead Poets Society. It warms this reviewer’s heart to hear that inane, pandering, status quo-reinforcing film taken down a few pegs. God knows that public-funded education in the United States is a horrific shambles.

Especially worthy is Arrow’s inclusion of a 1958 original radio broadcast of Unman, Wittering and Zigo. The play has apparently stayed current, partly by virtue of parodies . . . what would a remake of Giles Cooper’s story need to change, to become up-to-date?

Reviewed by Glenn Erickson

Unman, Wittering and Zigo
Blu-ray rates:
Movie: Very Good +
Video: Excellent
Sound: Excellent
Supplements:
Audio commentary by Sean Hogan and Kim Newman
Appreciation by Matthew Sweet
Retrospective featurette Unman, Terhew, Lipstrob and Mrs Ebony with cast members Michael Howe, Michael Cashman, James Wardroper and Carolyn Seymour
The original 1958 recording of Giles Cooper’s radio play
Original trailer; Image gallery
Fold-out poster with original and new artwork by Eric Adrian Lee
Illustrated booklet with essays by Kevin Lyons and Oliver Wake.
Deaf and Hearing-impaired Friendly? YES; Subtitles: English (feature only)
Packaging: One Blu-ray in Keep case
Reviewed: August 2, 2023
(6971zigo)

^*   We’re of two minds on the issue: there’s plenty of evidence for the argument that People Are No Damn Good, yet they can also be marvelously generous and humane.

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